Fallout doesn’t really have a Bloody Baron. Which is to say, it’s not a series defined by its quests. The steadfast dynasty of post-apocalyptic RPGs is more about places than people. Locations over loquaciousness. Its best stories are typically buried under five feet of rubble, and dug out with archeological care through terminals and holotapes.
Nonetheless, over almost three decades of irradiated exploration, some standout missions have emerged. Most are potent displays of the genre’s potential for reactivity—tales which allow for creative approaches, and multiple outcomes you’d never uncover without a spot of wiki-diving. Others are memorable simply because they’re odd: creepy, daft or moving, written in a distinct tone that stands out against the green-grey backdrop of wasteland America.
9. The Silver Shroud (Fallout 4)
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In a series where you carry your choices on your shoulders, there’s freedom to be found in slipping out of your jumpsuit and becoming someone else for a bit. In this case, the Silver Shroud: fictional star of a comically earnest radio serial.
With a ghoul in a porkpie hat as your Lucius Fox, you get to run around dispensing vigilante justice: speaking in a silly voice, carrying a silver submachine gun, and leaving calling cards on the corpses of your enemies. Of course, things get out of hand and the criminal underworld strikes back. But it all ends with the finest-ever use of VATS: putting down a villain right before he plants a bullet in Kent Connolly’s head. “Death has come for you, evildoer. And I am its Shroud.”
8. Find out what happened to Karl (Fallout 2)
The stakes are high. The town of Modoc is ready to murder a community of cave farmers, which it blames for the disappearance of a local named Karl. The farmers claim Karl ran off, in a direction vaguely to the north-west.
You’re given a month to prove the man’s still alive. That’s only just enough time to hike across the desert to the Den, dig up Karl from a drink-induced stupor, and return to Modoc with his testimony. The desperation is palpable, as is the relief when war is averted. Unless it isn’t. Of course, it all goes a lot faster if you’re rolling across the dunes in a Chrysalis Highwayman, the series’ only functional car.
7. Wastelanders (Fallout 76)
When Bethesda returned NPCs to the West Virginia wasteland, it did so in style. It was surreal to not only meet the Overseer we’d been hankering after on holotapes for so long, but to hear her audacious new plan: to secure the US gold reserve hidden in Vault 79, and use it to establish a bullion-backed currency in Appalachia. A new economy would pave the way for taxes, laws and government. Or so she argues.
While you ponder whether capitalism is really what post-apocalyptic America has been missing, you’ll recruit either the Settlers or Raiders to pull off the heist. Then, once you’re inside the vault, decide what to do with the gold: give some to your allies, split it between the factions, or keep the entirety for yourself. What? Jetpack blueprints are expensive. And as a ghoul named Gordon of Gecko once told me: greed is good.
6. Take it Back! (Fallout 3)
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“It’s not ready for field tests, let alone live fire situations. The weapons haven’t been calibrated, the navigation detection system is offline…” Shut up, boffins! It’s the closing stage of Fallout 3’s campaign and we’ve earned some bombast. That comes in the form of Liberty Prime, a commie-hating “giant tin can” salvaged by the Brotherhood. You’ll accompany it to Washington DC’s water purifier and seize Project Purity from an ill-intentioned US president, if you can imagine such a thing.
This is Fallout’s answer to a tank support mission—all clumsy pomp and detonating vertibirds in the name of honouring Papa Neeson. And honestly, it’s deserved. What’s the point of going first-person if you can’t embrace the FPS genre when the mood is right? The dozens of hours of quiet and contemplative RPG exploration that precede this moment makes the juxtaposition all the more powerful. A final, heightened shootout hits like a tall drink of H20 on a hot day.
“When we’re done with this, everyone can have a nice cold glass of water on me,” deadpans Sentinel Lyons. “Let’s move.”
5. Come Fly With Me (Fallout: New Vegas)
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For some Fallout fans, there’ll only ever be one brotherhood: the Bright Brotherhood. The ghouls holed up in the REPCONN test facility are preparing for a rocket launch, and need your help to requisition parts and clear the place of hostiles. Come Fly With Me is remembered for the goofy payoff, in which the ghouls haphazardly leave orbit to the accompaniment of the Ride of the Valkyries.
But much of the quest’s magic lies in its wrinkles: the basement full of invisible Nightkin who can be handled kindly if you’re patient enough; the option to sabotage the engines with Sugar Bombs. And most poignantly, the confused human engineer who thinks he’s a ghoul and is doomed to be left behind by his adopted family.
Still: it’s hard not to root for the ghouls, determined to achieve escape velocity and find somewhere free from sand and bigotry.
4. Become an Initiate (Fallout 1)
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Nasty, brutish, and short. That’s the nature of your first ever encounter with the Brotherhood of Steel. Their bunker is an awesome sight against the backdrop of SoCal’s desert—the tip of a technologically advanced iceberg you desperately want in on. Ask to join, though, and they’ll fob you off with a mission that straddles the line between holy crusade and schoolyard prank. “You have to go to the ruins of the Ancient Order,” says Initiate Cabbot, puffing out his cheeks apologetically. “Uh, you’ve gotta go inside and bring back something that proves that you were there. You’ll do it? You will?”
The ruins, it transpires, are The Glow—the most heavily irradiated crater on Fallout’s map. Entering the former military research facility is a death sentence to all but the most prepared of players. It’s a quest that cements the values of the OG Brotherhood upfront. On matters of preservation, they’ll prioritise technological relics over human life every time.
3. Hole in the Wall (Fallout 4)
The makers of the Fallout TV show must have been taking notes as they played through this sinister, slow burn vault drama. A young boy slips behind the walls of Vault 81, where he’s bitten by a diseased mole rat.
To find the cure, you must explore a crawlspace lab where hidden scientists subjected the adjacent citizens to airborne illnesses pumped through the vents. Or would have done, had an Overseer not disobeyed her orders, allowing 81’s residents to live in oblivious peace for generations. It’s a quietly moving story told mainly through vignettes.
If you’ve been bitten by the rats yourself, you’ll have to make a final choice: leave the boy to die, or live with a permanent reduction to your HP. For once, it’s not easy to play the hero.
2. That Lucky Old Sun (Fallout: New Vegas)
A microcosm of everything New Vegas fans are into, packed into a single location. Helios One is a power plant that’s on the fritz, and the New California Republic wants its energy directed to their home states. Unfortunately for them, the physicist they’ve assigned to the job is a frazzled fraud in sunglasses, and his assistant is a mole for a radical humanitarian group called the Followers of the Apocalypse.
Your options for getting inside are a smorgasbord of skill checks for speech, science and lockpicking, plus the potential to disguise yourself as an NCR trooper. From there, you can gain the trust of the mole, or simply pickpocket their terminal password, according to taste.
In the process, you’ll learn about the Brotherhood of Steel’s doomed attempt to defend the plant—a disaster that’s left them on the backfoot in the Mojave ever since. Then, having studied the past, you’ll determine the future. The quest climaxes with a region-shaking decision about where to send the power. Would madam care to wipe out the surrounding NCR soldiers with an orbital strike for dessert?
1. Find the Water Chip (Fallout 1)
You’re booted out of Vault 13 with an aqua-clear objective: find a replacement chip for the water purification system, and do it quickly. “Simply put, we’re running out of drinking water,” sighs the Overseer. “No water, no vault.”
Fallout’s first ever main quest is a controversial one, since it puts a hard timer on a genre that traditionally moves at the player’s own pace. But it’s also a masterstroke, introducing a note of panic that pushes you towards imperfect solutions. In the Hub, you might stave off the inevitable by paying the local water merchants to send a caravan to Vault 13, extending your deadline by 100 days. And if you’re desperate enough, you could steal a water chip from a nearby ghoul settlement without figuring out an alternate supply for the locals. One definition of evil, Fallout suggests, is simply a good deed done for your community at the expense of another.
In a final twist, original Fallout designer Tim Cain has suggested that the water chip quest is a joke at your expense. All three of the game’s pre-made player characters are troublemakers that the vault would be glad to see the back of. And out in the wasteland, you’re met by the corpse of Ed, a skeletal vault dweller who made it fewer than ten feet from the door before succumbing to the surface. Perhaps nobody ever expected you to make it home. There’s little more Fallout than a bitterly ironic laugh, coughed up from the dusty lungs of an irradiated vault reject.
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